The Hunter: Barry Bonds

I have a piece in the April issue of GQ on Barry Bonds. I report on his fate after leaving baseball and his experience being the target of baseball’s efforts to purge the steroids era from its past. The embattled former Giants slugger has been unsuccessful in his attempts to get back into the game. But more so, the piece is a portrait of a man whose life is at an inflection point, between his past and an uncertain future. And I also report on Bonds’ newfound passion: hunting. From the piece:

He pulls out his binoculars and surveys the field. Soon a giant whitetail emerges out of the woods, and Mogle gets excited. “This guy is big!”

“Oh, without question,” Bonds says as the camera remains fixed on the deer. “He’d be pretty tough to pass up right there.”

As he lifts his gun, his expression turns cold and clinical. Here’s a glimmer of the old Barry Bonds, the fearsome slugger who once wore this same look as he hulked over the batter’s box, daring pitchers to confront him head-on. He cradles the rifle in his shoulder and sights the deer through the scope. It’s strange, in one sense, that the most hunted man in baseball is now an avid hunter, but not so surprising that he still gets the jones to take aim at something. “He’s coming in, he’s coming in right now,” Bonds says as the whitetail approaches. “Okay, get ready.”

He puts his finger on the trigger. The image goes split screen—Bonds on the left, the buck on the right. The picture closes in and steadies on Bonds before suddenly turning dark. Silence. And then…CRACK!

Read the full piece HERE

And watch Barry shoot a whitetail buck:

Horace Mann Revolt Update

I have a New York Magazine piece out this week that revisits my March 2008 cover story on Horace Mann. The school continues to be buffeted by a crisis of authority. Students complain the faculty, led by the upper school head David Schiller, is clamping down on their rights. Schiller, for his part, was outraged earlier this year when the current student president and vice president attacked his plans to exert more control over student assemblies.

The issue burst into public last week when Charles Stam, the former student body president who is now a freshman at Columbia, wrote a letter to the entire Horace Mann student body and faculty that was leaked to Gawker. Charles, who I gave the pseudonym “Jeffrey Robbins” in my New York piece, wrote in his letter attacking Horace Mann’s newspaper, the Record, after he was informed they wouldn’t publish it on campus. Stam also defended the current student leadership and excoriated the administration for taking more control over student affairs.

Stam told me he still feels passionately about Horace Mann and said he’s not the conservative caricature that he feels Gawker and others make him out to be. For more on Stam’s first interview since my piece ran, read the full thing HERE